Teaching Your Children How to Manage Finances Can Save You Money

What skill is necessary in the modern world? Is it crafting a wigwam from a garbage or surviving in the tropical forest? Heh, itâ€™s nothing of that. If you are a happy parent, teach your children one of the main things in XXI century how to manage their own finance.

Who doesnâ€™t like growing a pile of coins? It was exciting in your childhood. So what about making such gift to your children? Teach them how to manage finance and they could buy clothes, books, assignment writing, or some concert tickets on their own. Is it good? Itâ€™s great!

Here I prepared some tips for making this process more comfortable.

Use creative envelopes/jars.

You can buy really different jars in the form of houses, dolls. animals, vehicles. It can be useful for your child as the method of visualizing their dreams. Itâ€™s important: your child must take the active part in buying individual â€œbankâ€.

Prepare a short story the envelope budgeting system (you can find more information on the Web). This will bring the understanding of jarâ€™s importance to a child.

Set a good example

Children learn by looking at the parents. So be a nice example for a child. Set up your own envelope budgeting system (if you havenâ€™t done this yet) and explain some of your actions from the economy positions. Maybe you will even understand how to kick off some financial problems that eat holes in your pocket.

Next tips are applied to the older children. Be sure, adults can be interested in saving money too – especially when they have many children.

Open a bank account

Do you remember that amazing feeling – you have opened own bank account? Make the dream come true and let your child be the part of business-like and serious bank mechanism. It can be inspiring! Help a child find the right bank with the best conditions and make together first contribution. If you read my lessons from the beginning of the article, you will have a good sum for it.

Let your child make mistakes

Do you know who doesnâ€™t make any mistakes? Those who donâ€™t do anything. So let your child make wrong moves. These small financial losses will perform win-win situations in the future, believe me. But if the child does wrong because of your own mistakes – itâ€™s a different situation. I can only recommend you to use the time machine and learn good financial behavior in your childhood.

Play games

Game is the best way of the reality exploration. There are many board and video games that can be a field for testing the financial skills. Monopoly is a mainstream, while your own created and printed game is the creative one. SimCity, Civilization would be a challenge for understanding the world-size financial processes. And all of this takes an interesting interactive form! Such a pity that I had no opportunity to have my economic theory lessons in the form of computer game sessions.

Talk about money

There is nothing strange in the fact of money talks. Bring the child to the idea that this is normal. Be his personal consultant (and itâ€™s a good time for reading the so called â€œsmart-moneyâ€ books.)

The main lesson that you can give your child – money is not the purpose, it is the instrument for achieving goals of any level.